John Gardner - October Light

Peter Wagner paused, staring as if his eyes were frozen. Santisillia had come up from the stream with some fish — black with white squiggles, horrible creatures — and was hunkered down now, a few yards away from him, listening. Mr. Goodman was asleep under Jane’s hand. Mr. Nit was still on watch, probably out cold.

Peter Wagner said: “One night we were ramming through heavy drifts, coming to an overpass. He’d been at it all day, getting people out of cars. All of a sudden we hit something — there was a crunch and a sound of glass breaking, and suddenly the tractor tires were spinning and the tractor was skittering sideways. I saw his foot hit the clutch and his mittened paw hit the gearshift at the same time, and the tractor spun back. In the white of the headlights, swirling in the snowstorm like pure white fire, we saw a smashed in car-door, smashed in so far you could see the darkness inside. Everything except the inside of the car was unnaturally bright. After a minute, in the snow underneath where the door was smashed, there was blood. I saw him walking toward it, hands out for balance, wide and awkward as a clown or a bear in the glitter of circus lights, every movement comical, as if somebody was guiding him with long sticks.”

He fell silent. No one offered comment. He continued to take pulls at his bottle, though surely it must be burning his mouth out, to say nothing of his brain. Sometimes he passed it to the Indian. Peter Wagner’s lips were puckered up as if the taste was terrible, but maybe that was from the story he’d told.

He said, “All books agree. We’re wrong for this place. We move through the world like anti-matter, ready to blow up on contact.”

When Jane looked over at Dancer she saw that he wasn’t asleep after all. He was watching. Overhead the stars were needlesharp bits of ice. She found herself scanning the sky carefully and more or less systematically, looking for that object.

Peter Wagner said — he was rubbing the front of his forehead now, and he no longer had the bottle, the Indian had taken it: “I’ve read books of all kinds — poetry, anthropology, religion, science — I’ve read more books than most of the doctors and lawyers I know. And I’ll tell you something. There are only two kinds of books in the world—” He raised one finger, a little drunkenly, it seemed to Jane. “There are books that desperately struggle to prove there’s some holy, miraculous meaning to it all and desperately deny that everything in the world’s mere belts and gears—” he shook out the second finger “—and there are books that say the opposite. After you’ve read a few, each kind of book is as boring as the other.”

“Come now,” Luther Santisillia said.

But Peter Wagner was adamant. The Indian beside him grew more still and morose. Except for the movement of his arm and throat, his body was motionless. His eyes were filled with rage. Peter Wagner said: “It’s all craziness. Hasn’t changed in ten thousand years, people still making up gods and devils, out of nothing, not a scrap, nothing but their scrawny need.”

“Come now,” Santisillia said again. “People don’t have to have gods to go on living.”

“Not if they’re lucky,” Peter Wagner answered, “and after you count out the early mortalities and suicides, most people are lucky. That’s statistics.” He grinned unpleasantly. “Some people aren’t, though. Lucky, I mean. I had a sister — or have. I don’t mean to make too much of it. Once she was pretty and more or less smart, and rich besides — real catch, you’d say — but she got hit by this fellow who didn’t see the light, and now she’s ugly and has the brains of a potato, can’t even pee without instruments. Such things are common — wrecked promise, obscenity, injustice. Not so common as to make you believe in a god who’s evil. Even a man like Chairman Mao, with his sixty million murders — most people survived it. It was just a little ripple, statistically. But if it happens to be you that the bad luck hits, that’s different, brother! You reel and stagger and clutch at your head, and if you mean to get up again, you quick make up one kind of idiotic book or the other. You make up some god who can make it all right, or you tell the truth, which takes your mind off it. They’ll drive you to suicide in the end, books.”

He fell silent. The lizards stood like dogs, looking up at him.

“I’m sorry about your sister,” Santisillia said.

Peter Wagner glanced at him, his eyes as sharp and angry as the Indian’s. “Fuck it, man. I made it up.”

Then for a long time no one spoke. There were fewer lizards now, though still too many, and those that were left moved more slowly, cooling with the night. At last Santisillia said, almost crossly, “Why don’t one of you people make a fire?”

“Good idea,” Jane said, and though her lethargy was so heavy she was sure she couldn’t move, she found herself getting up.

Captain Fist watched them like an old wolf peeking through trees.

• • •

Jane cooked, working a sweat up. The men hunkered around the fire doing nothing, hardly talking — all but Captain Fist, still sitting, tied up, near the cave mouth. Mr. Nit was peevish because no one had come to take over the watch. He sat with his legs crossed, feet under him, elbows on his knees, and glared at the fire. Peter Wagner sat against a rock, smoking pot, gazing at the western rim of stone, or at the stars perhaps, or at nothing.

Santisillia poked the fire, making it flare up, lighting all their faces. “Peter,” he said, “let me tell you about Captain Fist.”

Peter Wagner turned his head.

“I tell you the story partly because you’ll be interested,” Santisillia said, “partly because it has a moral. At least I think it does.”

Mr. Nit held the marijuana pipe toward him. Santisillia shook his head and looked over at the Captain, then back at Peter Wagner, and smiled. He said:

“Some people get their souls beaten out of them — bad luck, the pressure of events, and so forth. Some lose their souls through carelessness, neglect. But once in a while you have the honor of meeting a man who’s sold his soul outright, made a deal with the Devil. Now there’s a man worth knowing! And such a man is Captain Fist.” He pointed. Fist’s eyes squeezed shut. Santisillia grinned, drew out a plastic-tipped cigar, and lit it. “Our Captain Fist is a man deeply versed in philosophy. A stupid man, perhaps, and a vile toad even among stupid men, but nevertheless, well read. He has discovered beyond any shadow of a doubt that all life is mechanics, that faith, hope, and charity are the desperate stratagems of people who would blind themselves to truth. All men, he has come to understand, are victims, objects in fact no more rational than planets; good men, he’s discovered by his books, are as much the victims of random concussions in the universe as are bad. All this he will tell you in the greatest detail, quoting the best authorities. And every word he says is in some sense true.”

Jane frowned, waiting, then spatula’d the fish and corn meal out of the pan onto their plates and passed them around. Only Dancer thanked her. The others were too intent on Santisillia, or — except for Santisillia — too drugged. She glanced at Captain Fist. He couldn’t eat with the gag on, and if they took it off, the night would go black with his obscenities. She decided to let him starve. Mr. Goodman poured and passed out coffee. Santisillia carefully scraped off his cigar, set it on a flat rock beside him, and began to eat.

He said: “I’ll tell you how we met. We happened to be in Mexico, at the same time at the same place, on a buying trip. We took it out by road, in those days. Since Dusky’s capital was limited, all we had was a car — built-up fenders and so forth, you understand. As for Captain Fist—” He smiled, rolled his eyes up. “Ah, Captain Fist! He had, of all things, a nitro-glycerin truck.”